When Darkness Surrounds You

When I was a little girl, we did most of our traveling at night when it was cooler. Cars didn’t have air-conditioning back then. There weren’t as many arguments in the back seat at night as there was in the heat of the day. My parents shared the front seat with my little brother and sister, and I was crammed in the back seat with two brothers and my older sister. We would lie all over each other with our enormous German shepherd, Rowdy, hanging his dripping tongue over the seat in the back of the station wagon.
I was usually the last one to drift off. I would wait until the others were asleep and ask my dad questions until I fell asleep. Eventually, I learned the difference between truck lights and car lights. At one point, I knew the brand of cars coming toward us by its headlights and when a train was coming.

I could see the trains far away, and it thrilled me to be able to tell dad about the trains with such accuracy. I asked him why the train light was so much brighter than the car and truck lights around us. He said that trains were so much more powerful than the smaller vehicles that they needed more light to travel safely.
One day, while I am traveling with my dad, I realized that during the day we I couldn’t see the trains as far off as we had been able to at night. It seemed that their lights weren’t shining as bright. In fact, I could hardly tell the train had lights on at all. I saw the train before I saw the light. Daddy explained why the light wasn’t bright in the daytime. He told me that there was no darkness to make it shine.
As Christians, we can be doing well with blessings flowing into our lives from everywhere. Then the bottom falls out, and nothing seems to
go right. The difference is like day and night. The Lord said it rains on the just and the unjust. He asked us if the world came against him why would we expect it to be different for those who loved Him. He gave us his Word as a light to shine in front of us in the world of darkness. He said his Word was “a lamp to my [our] feet and a light to my [our] path” (Psalms 119-105).
Today’s Christian can be like that train. The train still has its light on during the day; however, like the train, we should be the brightest at night. When we hide God’s word in our heart, his light shines through us in every circumstance. When everything is going well, the Word, living in us is shining. It goes before us revealing the tracks God has laid out for our lives and shines brightly for others who need it. Though, it may not appear up as strong as it does when darkness surrounds us.
When darkness presses in on us, making us feel like we may stumble and fall, we have God’s Word to point out the road ahead and steer us the way we should go. Unlike the world, when we know God is with us, and have his Word buried in our hearts, we can keep our eyes are on our journey.
Lost people everywhere are searching for something that shines bright and stands out in the darkness. When we’re moving on with the love, joy, and peace of God shining brightly through us, we can be a beacon of hope. Like that train, we will be visible for a considerable distance ahead. The darker our world, the brighter our light shines.
My husband compares God’s Word to the stripes in the center of the highway on one of our dark, soupy, foggy Houston mornings. Sometimes the fog is so thick we can’t see the taillights on the car in front of us until we’re right up on it, and it’s hard to be sure that we’re in our lane. By keeping our eyes on the white stripes and carefully watching the poor visibility offered by our headlights, we can arrive safely at our destination.
When we rely on God’s Word in this dark, soupy foggy world we live in, we have the same assurance that we will arrive safely at the goal God has planned for our lives.

Dr. Sharon Schuetz has a Ph.D. in clinical Christian counseling and has counseled hundreds of families over the past 25 years. In 2013 she and a friend started the website Lady-Patriots.com with 26 different authors and millions of visitors until she sold it in 2016. Since then, she has worked in her local county, Trinity, Texas in the Republican Party, Republican Women, the Trinity County Patriots, and is the former editor of the local newspaper, The Trinity Standard. She recently accepted the position of Secretary of the Trinity County Republican Party. Sharon and her husband of 42 years, Michael, pastor the Sebastopol Community Church in Trinity, and have three children and ten grandchildren.